Should also mention, the box is shockingly small and light. It's less than half the size of the GTX 970 / Xeon custom built workstation I sold recently, and I literally have not heard it yet. Compare that to the MacBook Pro on my desk which I hear on a daily basis.

I can, it looks like that's a drive performance test, is that right? Right now mine just has the cheap SanDisk SSD that ships w/ it but the 850 Pro will be here in a few days. I'll run it now and then but I'd expect a dramatic difference.

I can, it looks like that's a drive performance test, is that right? Right now mine just has the cheap SanDisk SSD that ships w/ it but the 850 Pro will be here in a few days. I'll run it now and then but I'd expect a dramatic difference.

Following up on this, while I wait for my 850 Pro to arrive, someone w/ very similar specs ( same proc as this Envy OC'd to the same freq w/ quad channel RAM, though he only has 16GB and I'm on 32 ) reports getting 6.7 GB/s read and 6.3 GB/s write w/ rapid mode. He installed every benchmark he could find, and observed how underclocking his processor and RAM slowed the performance of the SSD at a 1:1 scale.

So at this point if SATA 3 and a Samsung SSD are an option and presuming you have at least 8GB of RAM I can't see any argument to go w/ M2 because the performance won't even be in the same ballpark.

@Breffni-Potter They use a high-end PCIE express SSD that's actually supposed to get closer to 2GB/s.

That's nuts!

Who needs THAT kind of IO

For me the real appeal isn't the sustained transfer, that's just cool. It's in the responsiveness. So, even on my 2016 Retina MacBook Pro w/ a quad core and 16GB of RAM and a PCIe SSD that's rated at almost 2GB, there is intermittent UI lag all of the time. Things just take longer to respond, even though in benchmarks it does fine. Having your computer respond to you INSTANTLY and CONSISTENTLY, to me, is the biggest luxury you can have. The difference is very palpable, in fact I just opted to return my MacBook Pro because now that I have this hexacore w/ rapid mode I just cannot stand how laggy the pretty much brand new mac feels. So in a sense, I need that kind of IO, or at least how there's no more waiting for IO because everything just streams to RAM and then syncs in the background. I've never been a Samsung fan, but baking this into a consumer part, and making it work in Windows, makes me want to kiss them on the mouth. Their killer SSDs combined w/ this tech have basically revolutionized how quickly and fluidly I can interact w/ computers, and for that I'll forever golf clap them.

I have self-admittedly EXTREMELY high standards for what I define as "snappy", and it's a plague that prevents me from using some software ( like some popular IDEs ) because they just can't keep up w/ the pace at which I need to be able to stream code from my fingertips to feel fully productive. Basically I hate waiting for anything small. A new tab to open, one to close, code hinting to process and render, a file list read, a web page to serve and render. Things like boot up or shut down time don't matter to me, because those are one-offs when you're not trying to accomplish something granular. App load times also don't matter, though typically the faster those are the faster the overall "snappyness" will be. It's a quirk, but I think there are a lot of people like me, in fact I've seen a lot of people blow up on smaller scales when their computers aren't responsive. I also feel like I have an exaggerated ability to perceive latency, for example most people I've talked to can't feel that command + tab on OS X is slightly, but palpably slower than alt + tab on Windows ( probably because they have a programmed animation that has an exact, while superficial duration before the stuff is fully faded and at its final static position ). Stuff like that bothers me. The old OS X fullscreen animation used to make me homicidal. It's faster now ( as of El Capitan ), but still obnoxiously longer than it should be. So to answer your question, snappyness is achieved when I don't feel like I'm waiting on an interface to deploy my next keystroke or click, or in more abstract terms, "when a computer can mostly keep up with me". There is not a single mac on the market today, even a $4,000 Mac Pro, that consistently can. End rant.